Character Keys

One of the Confederate officers who rides with J.E.B. Stuart in Flags in the Dust; it is on his horse that the captured Union Major is carried. (He does not seem to be related in any way to the Wyatt sisters who live next door to the Benbows in Jefferson.)

In "A Courtship," Captain Studenmare is the owner of the steamboat that visits the Chickasaw plantation annually. He depends upon another man, David Hogganbeck, to pilot it. After he fires Hogganbeck for dereliction, he is forced to return to Natchez overland with his "steamboat slaves," the enslaved Negroes who do the physical work on board the ship (378).

According to the narrator of "All the Dead Pilots," Spoomer is a snob from a family of snobs who owes his rank to the influence of his uncle, a general. Spoomer's snobbery is displayed when he tells his dog not to eat the trash behind the enlisted men's mess hall: "You mustn't eat that stuff," he says; "That's for soldiers" (519). Spoomer also uses his rank to impress women; he has taken one from Sartoris before the story begins.

The Memphis man whom the narrator of "Uncle Willy" identifies as "Captain Bean at the airport" refuses to teach Willy how to fly without a certificate from a doctor but is willing to teach Secretary, Willy's black driver - which seems to flaunt the rules of segregation (241). His title suggests he may be an ex-World War I aviator, like many other flyers in Faulkner's fictions, but that is conjecture.

Speaking outside the pages of his art, Faulkner called Caddy Compson his "heart's darling," and The Sound and the Fury his attempt to draw her "picture." It's a very modern portrait, however, defined by her absence everywhere in the novel except in the minds of her three brothers, each of whom attempts to fill the absences at the center of his own life with what he tries to make her represent or (to use the term that is both there and absent in the novel's Shakespearean title) to 'signify.' On her own terms, Caddy almost too good to be believable.

Colonel Sartoris' killing of two Northerners during Reconstruction is told four times in the fictions. The first time, in Flags in the Dust, Will Falls refers to them as "them two cyarpet-baggers" (23). They are given names in Light in August, where the same event is retold from Joanna Burden's perspective. The younger of these men is her half-brother, Calvin Burden II; Joanna calls him "a boy who had never even cast his first vote" (249).

We can say for sure that this character lives in or near the Frenchman's Bend part of Yoknapatawpha, but otherwise our composite Bookwright|Bookright is based on interpretation. In The Town Cal Bookright is the father of the woman Zack Houston marries. In The Mansion Calvin Bookwright is a moonshiner: according to Hoke McCarron, the "stuff [he] used to make" tasted "jest like" Bushmill's, a well-known brand of Irish whiskey (190). In The Reivers "Uncle Cal Bookwright" makes moonshine whiskey that can be bought at Mack Winbush's for two dollars a gallon (12).

In The Hamlet the store owner from whom Ab buys the milk separator is named Cain . (In the original version of this event, "Fool about a Horse" [1936], the man who owns the store is Ike McCaslin.)

Byron Snopes has four children - probably all illegitimate, legally - with a Jicarilla Apache in New Mexico. According to Charles Mallison's narrative in The Town, "the tallest was a girl though we never did know whether she was the oldest or just the tallest" (378); like her brothers, she is wearing overalls when she arrives in Jefferson. (All four children are mentioned in one phrase in The Mansion, as Byron's "four half-Snopes half-Apache Indian children, 327.)

One of the major characters in Light in August, Bryon Bunch is a "small man who will not see thirty again" (47). He came to Jefferson seven years before the novel begins, and leaves the town before it ends. The bookkeeper at the planing mill where he works calls him a "hillbilly" (413). While in Jefferson, for six days every week he is a steady, dependable worker in the mill; every Sunday he directs a country church choir. Scrupulously honest with himself and others, Byron is also a sweet-tempered man.

Butch, the deputy sheriff who bullies Boon and Corrie in Parsham in The Reivers, says his last name is "Lovemaiden" (187). This could be true, though it's not impossible that he gives himself that name as another way to annoy Boon. He is described as being "almost as big as Boon and almost as ugly, with a red face and a badge" (168) and "a bachelor" (190). Lucius says he smells of "sweat and whiskey" (170).

According to Joanna in Light in August, many members of the Burrington family she descends from still live in New Hampshire, although she has only seen these relatives "perhaps three times in her life" (241).

In The Sound and the Fury the Burgesses live near if not across the street from the Compsons. The little girl in the family comes home from school just as Caddy used to. She is used to Benjy "running along the fence" (53), and unafraid. When Benjy finds the gate unlocked one day after Caddy's wedding, he catches at this girl and "tries to say" (53) something to her - he himself cannot say what even to himself - but her father, assuming he intends to assault her, knocks him out with a fence picket.

In As I Lay Dying, Anse's mother is mentioned in passing by Doctor Peabody. As he climbs the steep slope up to the Bundren house, Peabody wonders "how his mother ever got up to birth him" (42).

The youngest of the sons in the MacCallum|McCallum family is Buddy. He first appears in Flags in the Dust as a kind of foil to Bayard Sartoris: both have served in World War I - Buddy has a combat medal to show how well he fought - but Buddy is not a member of any 'lost generation.' He returns to Yoknapatawpha, resumes his place in the yeoman family (though he doesn't display the medal, in deference to his un-reconstructed ex-Confederate father who refuses to believe his son fought in a "Yankee" army, 342), and continues his life as a countryman and avid hunter.

Buck Turpin is probably a merchant or businessman in Jefferson. In The Sound and the Fury he owns the lot in which the traveling show that performs in town over the Easter weekend sets up its tent, being paid $10 for that.

In Flags in the Dust the man "with an army pilot's wings on his breast" drinking with Bayard in the Chicago nightclub flew with the Sartoris twins in the British air corps during World War I (384). In the later short story "Ad Astra," set at the front during that war, Monaghan describes himself as "shanty Irish," because his late father made "a million dollars digging sewers in the ground" (414). He is also a former student at Yale. Monaghan seems uncomfortable with his complex social status, and there is "something of the crucified" about him after three years of war (414).

In The Town, Buck Connors II is the son of Marshal Buck Connors and friends with Chick Mallison. Chick remembers him as one of the group of boys who dared each other during the hunting party that takes place at Harrykin Creek. (The Marshal name is elsewhere spelled 'Conner,' but here both father and son are 'Connors.')

In Intruder in the Dust Bryan is the third of Hub Gowrie's six sons, Bryan is the one who runs the "family farm which fed them all" (161).

In Flags in the Dust Moore is the member of the delegation from the Second Baptist Church who formally, and reluctantly, reads out to Old Bayard the amount of money Simon owes the church building fund. He is described as "a small ebon negro in sombre, over-large black" (284).

A former "Marine sergeant" (295) who, after seeing a vision of Jesus during a battle in the Pacific, comes back to the U.S. to run a religious community out of his ramshackle house. His wife reportedly "ran off" with a salesman while Goodyhay was at war (294). He is described in The Mansion as "a lean quick-moving man in the middle thirties with coldly seething eyes and the long upper lip of a lawyer or an orator and the long chin of the old-time comic strip Puritan" (293).

In Light in August, Bedenberry is preaching when Joe enters the Negro church and tries "to snatch him outen the pulpit" (323).

According to the narrator of "By the People," the compact organs manufactured by "the Remish Musical Company of South Bend, Indiana," were so popular with the country folk in Frenchman's Bend that in time "boy children from that section were bearing into puberty and even manhood Remish as their Christian names" (87). The narrator of this story is not noticeably facetious, and Faulkner's country people in other stories name their children things like "Montgomery Ward," so there's no reason to think this is just a joke.

Unlike the upper-class boy narrators of Faulkner's previous fictions, the unnamed eight-year-old who narrates the three 'Grier' stories in the early 1940s - "Two Soldiers," "Shingles for the Lord" and "Shall Not Perish" - narrates from within the class of impoverished farmers who subsist on the poor land around Frenchman's Bend. His concerns are closely tied to his family - mother, father and brother Pete - but in the first and last of the stories Faulkner also uses him to represent his caste in a new context, the second World War.

Never given a first name in "Tomorrow," this "country girl of seventeen" (90) falls for Buck Thorpe's swagger. Her father, referred to only as "Bookwright," apparently discover her during "the inevitable elopement at midnight" and shoots Buck (90). Her subsequent fate is not mentioned.

At the end of Intruder in the Dust Gavin mentions "Booker T. Washington" twice while talking to Lucas, contrasting the way Lucas did "what nobody expected you to" with how Washington "did only what everybody expected of him" (237). Gavin's meaning is extremely difficult to pin down. The historical Booker T. Washington was born into slavery but by the end of the 19th century was perhaps the best-known black leader in America. As the principal of Tuskegee Institute, a prominent orator and an adviser to several U.S.

In Light in August, Bobbie comes from a brothel in Memphis to the railroad town where she works for Max and Mame, by day as a waitress "in a small, dingy, back street restaurant" and by night as a prostitute. She responds to the romantic advances of 18-year old Joe Christmas, even though "she would never see thirty again" (172).

The man whom Strutterbuck refers to in The Mansion as "Black Jack" is John Joseph Pershing, who led the American Expeditionary Force that went to Europe during the last year of World War I - or as Strutterbuck puts it, who went "to France to run the show over there" (84). Strutterbuck claims to know Pershing, but there is not the slightest chance he is telling the truth, about that or anything else.

William Avery Bishop (1894-1956) led all Canadian aviators during World War I, being credited with shooting down 72 German planes. The captive German aviator of "Ad Astra" reports that one of his younger brothers, an ace pilot himself, "iss killed by your Bishop . . . that good man" (419).

In "Pantaloon in Black" and again in Go Down, Moses, Birdsong is the white night-watchman at the mill whom Rider kills. For fifteen years he has run a crap game using "crooked dice" which allow him to cheat the black mill workers out of some of their weekly pay. He is part of a large family clan; as the deputy sheriff says, "It’s more of them Birdsongs than just two or three. . . . There’s forty-two active votes in that connection" (252, 148). Birdsong is repeatedly referred to in the narrative as "the white man" who carries a "heavy pistol in his hip pocket" (250-51, 145).

This "Binford" (no first name) is one of the young men in Frenchman's Bend who are courting Eula Varner in The Mansion. He is probably related to the Dewitt Binford who marries one of Flem's sisters. It's also possible but very unlikely that he is related to Lucius Binford, the man of the house in a Memphis brothel.

Bilbo is a minor figure in the last two volumes of the Snopes trilogy. In The Town he is the son of I.O. Snopes and his second wife and the twin to Vardaman Snopes. Not even that much is made clear when he is briefly mentioned inThe Mansion. He is named after Theodore G. Bilbo, a Mississippi Governor and U.S. Senator who was a staunch defender of white supremacy.

In The Town Big Top is Guster's husband and father to Aleck Sander and Little Top. Only his name appears in the narrative (55).

In The Mansion Holcomb is a "thick but not fat and not old" woman who gives Mink chores around the house and points him in the direction of Brother Goodyhay (291).

The country boy who narrates "Shall Not Perish" notes that Sartorises "still lived in our county" in 1942 (112). In the collected fictions, however, there is only one Sartoris left by that time, the son of Bayard Sartoris III and Narcissa Benbow who was born on the same day his father died in 1920, at the end of Flags in the Dust, and given his name as his mother's attempt to avoid the apparent curse on the various Bayards and Johns in the Sartoris line of succession.

One of Ben Quick's grandchildren is mentioned in The Hamlet, although not identified as a boy or a girl. Ben has a son named Isham, but whether he is the father of this child is also not said.

In "An Error in Chemistry" Ben Berry is a Deputy Sheriff. Sheriff Hub sends him to keep an eye on the Flints' house in case Joel Flint returns there after escaping from the local jail cell. He loses his "spectacles in the woods" during the pursuit, and so can't read an important clue to the killer's identity (123).

In Flags in the Dust Belle is Harry Mitchell's wife and Horace Benbow's lover for most of the novel, though she is Mrs. Benbow at the end. With Harry she has a daughter, Little Belle. Her hair is described as a "rich bloody auburn" (199), and her personality in equally vivid if pejorative terms: "her eyes are like hothouse grapes and her mouth was redly mobile, rich with discontent" (182). "Smoldering" is recurrent adjective for her (201, 203, etc.). Unlike the aristocratic Benbows, she is very much a citizen of the New South.

These "grandchildren" of Lucas Beauchamp are mentioned only in the short story "A Point of Law," and the one reference to them there is ambiguous. "He had one daughter with grandchildren" (214) - this could mean that the grandchildren are his daughter's instead of his. No other details about them, or about Lucas' larger family, are given in this short story. (When Faulkner revised the story into the "Fire and the Hearth" chapter of Go Down, Moses, the phrase "one daughter with grandchildren" was omitted.)

Thinking about his legacy in Go Down, Moses, Ike refers to "the ones who sired the Beauchamp who sired Uncle Hubert and his Uncle Hubert's sister" (294). The locution is confusing, in part because "his Uncle Hubert's sister" is in fact Ike's mother, Sophonsiba, as one might expect him to acknowledge. And obviously "the ones who sired" doesn't imply two fathers, but a longer generation of 'sires,' who would include Ike's great-grandfather and earlier male ancestors.

This is the only child of young Bayard's short-lived marriage to Caroline White. According to Jenny Du Pre, Caroline named him Bayard "nine months before it was born" (51). He and his mother both died while Bayard was in France, though Flags in the Dust does not explain the cause.

This Bayard Sartoris, the second on the family tree, is the son of Colonel John. In many of the eighteen texts in which he appears he is often called "Colonel Sartoris" too, even though he never fought in any war. In the larger story of Yoknapatawpha he is a transitional figure between the heroic past, when his father fought Yankees and built railroads, and modernity. His greatest achievement is to establish a bank in Jefferson, though it ultimately ends up in the hands of a Snopes.

According to Ratliff, the Greenwich Village sculptor who marries Linda Snopes is "not big, he jest looked big, like a football player" (190), and his "pale eyes" looked at you "missing nothing" (191). Several characters in The Mansion make it a point to mention that he is Jewish. Like so many of the southern men in the other fictions, however, Barton Kohl goes off to fight in a civil war - the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. He is killed there while serving with the Loyalists.

Ballenbaugh's son, also known in The Reivers simply as "Ballenbaugh," is, like his father, a "giant" (73). He claims to have served the Confederacy during the Civil War as a "partisan ranger" in Arkansas, but the narrative casts that story in doubt, suggesting instead that he acquired the pile of "uncut United States bank notes" he returns with in 1865 by more illegal means (73).

In "My Grandmother Millard," Philip lists his Uncle, who ran unsuccessfully "for Governor of Tennessee" on what was obviously a pro-slavery platform, as one of the ancestors who have worn the name "Backhouse" with honor (682).

In "My Grandmother Millard" Philip lists his father, who "died at Chapultepec" fighting in the Mexican-American War, as one of the ancestors who have born the name "Backhouse" with honor (682).

When Molly Beauchamp tries to placate her husband by saying she will take Roth Edmonds' infant son back to the big house, she says that "Aunt Thisbe can fix him a sugar-tit - " (49). This is the only reference to Thisbe in Go Down, Moses, but it's safe to infer from it that she is a servant in the Edmonds household.

A slave belonging to the Compson family who is mentioned in "My Grandmother Millard." Despite her enslavement, she remains loyal to the Compsons during a moment of danger.

In "That Will Be Fine," Aunt Louisa is married to Uncle Fred and mother to Louisa, Fred, and an unnamed baby. As Rodney's older sister, she repeatedly rationalizes her brother's behavior. She hides his misdoings from their father, and pleads for Mr. Pruitt to give him time to get the two thousand dollars he needs to cover his theft from the Compress Association.